GeekSpy, as we know it, began in 2012. Today, almost 11 years later, it has reached the end of the road. We had a good run, and we want to sincerely thank all of you for reading and joining in discussions with us. It's been fantastic.

It's actually been a full decade since its inspiration shut its own doors. In fact, the time between then and now is about as long as the time between my first post on GameSpy in 2001 and this place launching. How time flies.

I got a solid year of fun bringing a bunch of oldies back together, and I'm extremely grateful for it. Building this was a labour of love, keeping me sane at a time when I was literally not allowed to seek gainful employment. But while keeping this place running isn't exactly difficult, I am not keen on shouldering the liability of storing all of you fine people's email addresses and passwords in this day and age. Cyberspace is a scary place and I can do without the worry.

On May 21st 2023 the database for these forums will be wiped and the bulletin board software removed. Static stuff like archived files and avatar collections will stay online since they don't present me with any such problems.

For anyone needing a GSF fix in future, I can recommend the GameSpy section of the IGN Boards which contains some familiar faces.

Until May 21st, you're welcome to read through and post here as you please - before it all disappears in a puff of smoke.

In Reply To #1

This is my fault for bumping a couple of threads, isn’t it? I’M SORRY, I WAS BORED.

Isn’t there something we can sign that says we don’t care about our data and privacy? Or maybe you could just change your name to Optus??




Wait... what

In Reply To #1

I didn't remember it being this green.

In Reply To #2

It was in fact your posts that reminded me that I still hadn't done this yet, so you're welcome to take your fair share of the blame!

I don't know what yet-to-be-discovered vulnerabilities are out there, which might give someone access to all the other stuff I keep on my web server. So it's not purely about your data - it's also about mine!

In other news, my mailout to members has been largely marked as spam... so I think it might just be the three of us at this farewell party.

*dons a party hat*

*pours out a drink*

It is pretty damn green in here.

In Reply To #4

I'm always wearing my party hat, also, I quite enjoy Spam.

In Reply To #4

Man, I’ll drink to that.

GSF… it was the best of times, it was the blurst of times.

:’)

It seems modern email security has improved enough to ensure that password reset emails sent by this old-arse board aren't correctly going out for anyone.

So if you're here and reading this but need your password reset, just shoot me an email and I can reset it for you.

The internet is a much less interesting place these days, the promise of cyberspace having been consumed by corporate interests to feed us algorithmically generated articles on the current pop culture trends. So obscurantist and alienating that it is impossible to tell whether or not anyone is actually watching/playing and enjoying the latest movie/tv show/video game, or we're merely being told that everyone is so we go along with it. I do miss the simplicity and directness of GSF over the filtered and curated feeds of social media - even the disagreements and arguments were more genuine and interesting than the standard dance moves of modern comment stream interactions.

Anyway, I disappeared as much as anyone else, so I can't apportion blame to others without also indicting myself. I've taken to writing letters these days, or emails to the more disparate parts of the planet, so if that strikes anyone as something that they would like to pursue, I would be happy to hear from them. My email is finbad on the gmails.

I wrote all this in an email to Cyrris because I forgot my password, but he went and fixed it all for me so now I am pasting it here.

Don't be silly. We're all exclusively blaming Cereal Sam here.

But, yeah, I think the model of discourse we had at GSF became the bar by which I measured all my later online communities. And they've pretty much all come up short. I stopped reading my Facebook feed as the algorithms stopped showing me anything remotely important about my friends and just started shoving junk in my face. Nowadays the only equivalents are occasional Reddit threads on topics of interest, and Hacker News front page discourse. Not really involved, just reading - so it's not the same.

But even if it was... I guess there's the whole "got a life to live" thing which most people seem to insist on doing. Hell, even I went and got married - and that wasn't even legal when this place started.

Also I think the emails are fixed now. But check your junk folder just in case.

Nice to see a few familiar faces, even if it's to say goodbye. Hard to believe the initial launch of ForumPlanet was over twenty years ago!

I just visited SoCal last month and had dinner with Fargo, Mr. Pants, Dr. Angryman (who owns and is head chef at the MICHELIN-STARRED restaurant at which we ate!), Lumberjack, and Spiff, along with various spouses. We've all long-since moved on from IGN/GameSpy, of course, but we still keep in touch and it was awesome seeing them all in person again.

These days, I run the applications development team at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. We're a fully remote web dev team of five people (soon to be six). I live and work in Providence, RI. I got married to an amazing French woman, and am still writing my books, playing guitar poorly, making cocktails, and playing video games (currently finally getting around to Horizon Zero Dawn, which is fine but would probably be better if I hadn't played it after all the Tomb Raiders, Shadow of Mordor, AC Origins and Odyssey, and Elden Ring).

I'm still all over the place on ye olde web:

twitter - https://twitter.com/cwbuecheler
mastodon - https://mastodon.social/@cwbuecheler
instagram - https://instagram.com/cwbuecheler
facebook writing page - https://www.facebook.com/cwbwriting
web - https://cwbuecheler.com
writing web - https://cwbwriting.com
linkedin - https://linkedin.com/in/cwbuecheler

Hope y'all are doing well!

-Chris
(edit: wow holy shit that is an old picture of me. ain't got any of that brown hair left)

Oh, hey, I bet y'all will appreciate that I still have this ...

In Reply To #8

Man, I miss your way with words. This is spot on. In hindsight the GSF Forums was definitely too high a bar for the internet outside of it to live up to, especially as time went on. Wouldn't trade the memories, though.

In Reply To #9

this is overdue

People marrying legs... what has the world come to! Seriously though, congrats! I just got married myself in December... I wonder what else has been happening to everyone, away from these pages... *harp music*

In Reply To #1

Oh wow. I had sort of forgot about this outpost.

It does feel to me a bit like my foruming journey is over after 19 or so years. I started in Gamespy around 2004 (which amusingly enough people were already saying was worst than the “good old days”). I then migrated with a few of us to the IGN forums and the GCB, but I’ve even stopped posting there now as of late last year (I completed it by being elected President so quit).

And man have I lost a sense of the community this version of the internet gave me. Now it’s just random stuff on Twitter, or the people I know on Facebook. It feels a bit like the settling of the old west. Back in the early 2000s the forums were fun and new. Meeting new people. Anything could happen. Making a place your own. But then no one new came there anymore and they became ghost towns whilst everyone settled in the big social media cities.

But maybe I’ve just grown up. Everything seems fresh when you’re 16.

Anyway, thanks to everyone here for all the fun over the years. And especially Cyrris, who kept the flame alive and is one of approximately 3 forum people I’ve actually met.

Thanks for hosting this place all these years.

I too have become an old fart who misses the old days of the internet. When everything was exciting and new, and nobody had heard of "the algorithm".

We decided ourselves what we wanted to see. And while discussions could get heated (just as real life), people didn't start them to get Likes. Because the Like button hadn't been invented yet.

It's a shame the old GSF is gone, but it was never going to survive the onslaught of social media.